As Todd Crawford of Impact Radius puts it: “Marketers will need to monitor their vendors and partners for compliance with the GDPR. Vetting relationships will be extremely important, as well as ensuring that each party and your company have the appropriate consents and disclosures concerning collection, tracking, and processing personal data of your customers. Intelligent tools will be key for monitoring the types and treatment of covered data. As 2018 nears, it is essential to ask your vendors and partners whether they are or will be compliant by the May deadline, and to provide supporting details concerning their compliance efforts.”

Equally, you can charge businesses to ‘claim’ their listing, a method used by many large directory sites like Google Business and Yelp. This involves companies paying to upgrade their listing and adding information such as their web address, social media links, images, and more. Other revenue streams include charging for ad space, adding affiliate links and even charging for services and products on your directory site.

Google also began to suggest that publishers should be “nofollow”-ing links to advertisers, or else the publisher’s site could get hit with a Google penalty. This can all be avoided by establishing clear guidelines, staying up to date with FTC disclosure laws (and vehemently enforcing those disclosures), and prohibiting misrepresentation of your endorsements.

Some good tips. I fully agree that it’s all about trust and it is always good to recommend an affiliate product that you have actually used. Why risk your reputation on a product you don’t know if it’s any good or not? If people buy one dodgy product from your site, they will probably never make that mistake again. That it why my blog strongly advocates ethical affiliate marketing. It’s the best long term stragey for affiliate marketing success.
I support bootlegging – I don’t see it as being immoral or unethical in any way. I used to bootleg quite a bit in my youth, and I still do on occasion today (although not yet today in particular, I more meant “in the present”). If you want to hustle for your money, do what you must, baby. Download some software, music, movies, or other assorted digital goodness here and start slangin. It’s not an easy life, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.